Things are more promising than they were a few months ago – but political will and compromise are needed to find a long-term solution
On September 22 SNP MP Chris Law, speaking in the House of Commons, delivered a chilling account of an elderly man decapitated with a knife and a female soldier with her eyes gouged out and replaced by stones. The victims he described were Armenians killed during Azerbaijan’s unprovoked military aggression during which hundreds of people lost their lives. Critical infrastructure, settlements, schools and hospitals deep inside Armenia were hit. More evidence of atrocities have emerged including a video of the extrajudicial killing of Armenian soldiers. These actions echo those of Daesh in Syria and the wave of international condemnation has been swift and unequivocal leading to calls for war crimes investigations.
And yet Azerbaijan talks of peace but what sort of peace do they seek?
This latest aggression follows a pattern. In 2021 Azerbaijan seized 42 sq.km of Armenian sovereign territory and since the September 2022 attack that figure has almost tripled in size. The autocratic Azerbaijani ruler praised the occupation of new swaths of lands and reiterated his irredentist narrative against Armenia, repeating that “no one and nothing could stop him” in achieving his ambitions. Two years after the fighting stopped, Azerbaijan still holds dozens of Armenian prisoners of war. Azerbaijan’s government has announced that it intends to erase Armenian inscriptions on religious sites in the territory that it occupied in the 2020 war against Nagorno-Karabakh.
The tragedy in Ukraine has been a useful distraction for Azerbaijan but perhaps it’s also a lesson we should all heed. There must be vigilance against any further military escalation and recognition that a clear path towards a comprehensive peace has already been laid out. Since the end of the war in 2020 the Armenian Government has adopted the “peace agenda” and has committed to opening an era of peaceful development in the South Caucasus.